The missing piece in the UK Government’s net zero plan

Especially in the deep midsummer, the UK’s green and pleasant landscapes don’t look like they would present a problem for reaching our climate goals. Yet, our agricultural emissions have been mostly static for a decade and have even increased in some areas of the UK. While emissions from agriculture and land contributed 12% of the UK’s greenhouse gas footprint in 2018.

Land is unique in that it can be both a source and a sink of emissions. This makes it a critical sector for the UK’s net zero ambitions: if it reduces its own emissions enough, it can provide a way to offset emissions from other sectors that are difficult to decarbonise, like aviation or some types of heavy industry. Cutting emissions from land could also be a key part in helping the UK to turn around its rating as one of the most nature-depleted nations on earth: many critical UK carbon- and nature-rich ecosystems have been destroyed or damaged, with 80% of the UK’s peatlands having been degraded and 85% of England’s saltmarsh lost in the last century.

The UK Government recognises this with some impressive-sounding targets, including on tree-planting, peatland restoration and the proportion of farmers expected to be engaged in sustainable farming methods by 2035. The main vehicles to deliver these targets – the Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELM) and Nature for Climate Fund – are in the process of being rolled out alongside a myriad of other smaller schemes.

But dig a little deeper and things become murkier. The UK Government is refusing to disclose crucial detail for how they expect their land use programmes to cut emissions. In response to a recent FOI from WWF-UK, BEIS declined to release the underlying data that show how the policies and plans for agriculture and land use add up to the emissions cuts outlined in their Net Zero Strategy.

From the data that is available, it is unclear if and how government plans will deliver on headline targets. Where there are estimations of emissions cuts, they fall short of the UK Government’s own climate pathways for the sector over the coming decades: ELM is only expected to provide a third of the emissions reduction for the agriculture and land sector over the sixth carbon budget period, for example. However, even these plans are threatened with delay, and poor implementation has meant that interim targets are not being reached.

What the sector needs now is a clarity, vision and direction to embolden landowners and farmers looking to green their businesses. As the Committee on Climate Change recommended in their Independent Review of the Net Zero Strategy last year – and will likely reiterate in their Progress Report this week – this means that there needs to be a dedicated emissions reduction strategy for land across the UK.

After all, it is now one of the few sectors without its own decarbonisation strategy. How land use changes as we move towards net zero has important implications on the rest of the economy, from food production to bioenergy to offsets. WWF’s own work shows that there is much more scope for ambitious emissions cuts than the government’s current plans – this is potentially important as they consider revisiting and strengthening the UK’s 2030 climate target before COP27 in the hopes of getting other countries around the world to do the same. A clear and cross-cutting strategy would help farmers and landowners to navigate what is an extremely complex and still emerging policy and scientific environment.

Overall, we see an emissions cutting strategy being important in three key ways:

1. Outline an ambitious vision for how the land sector will contribute to meeting UK climate targets. This would clearly signal the direction of travel and draw in local communities to help shape the future of their landscapes
2. Set out a framework of policies that will deliver those plans in the coming decade. This would include being transparent on assumptions made around diet shift – widely considered to be essential to reducing emissions from land in the UK and globally but ruled out by the current Environment Secretary – and state how plans will reduce all greenhouse gas emissions, including from other key gases produced by agriculture, like nitrous oxide and methane. It would also provide guidance to farmers on navigating emerging funding streams from private markets for carbon credits and environmental services, alongside continued public funding for the delivery of public goods. 
3. Demonstrate how plans for emissions reductions feed into meeting wider government objectives on net zero, nature, food resilience and environmental protection. The UK Government has also pledged to halt and reverse the loss of biodiversity by 2030, has recently published a Food Strategy amid concerns about food price inflation and the increasing cost of living, and has upcoming strategies due on biomass and greenhouse gas removals. These plans and targets must be joined up to provide a comprehensive plan for the role land can play in meeting objectives across government. The Land Use Framework promised in the Government Food Strategy has potential to be a useful starting point here. 

Such a strategy would be a huge opportunity. With the right approach, land can not only make leaps towards achieving the UK’s net zero target but also deliver a food system that is resilient to future climate change and conflicts; where nature thrives within and outside farmland, and where growers and producers get a fairer share of the market, helping to avert the climate and nature crises just by doing their job.